The tenth edition of Impact is behind us. The anniversary Impact’25, held May 14-15, 2025, wasn’t just a review of front-page topics. It was an update on reality – in business, technology, culture and society. A condensed two days that drew leaders, practicalists, artists, visionaries, politicians, founders and people with quite real influence to one place.
🔊 Barack Obama, Tokarczuk, Fukuyama – conversations that resonate.
The program features 124 moderated discussions, 64 keynotes, 58 fireside chats and more than 100 off-stage activities – given in formats that hold your attention and leave you with concrete to think about.
10 stages, 23 thematic tracks, more than 80 hours of program – every minute was designed to answer the questions that today’s chief executives, policymakers, investors, activists or academics are asking themselves. Among the more than 650 speakers and presenters were:
Barack Obama – former U.S. President, who spoke about how to combine dreams with pragmatism and why courage is the currency of the future today,
Olga Tokarczuk – Nobel Prize winner, who talked about literature as a tool for social change,
Francis Fukuyama – political scientist and author of The End of History, who is writing the continuation of that history today,
Timothy Snyder – historian from Yale, who reminded that the future of Europe begins with awareness of its past.
All in all, more than 80 hours of a substantive program that drew you in like binge-watching on Netflix. But here, every sentence was spoken live, in the presence of those who make the real decisions.
“Ten years ago, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: to create an event that would be an icon of modern events. A meeting place, a relationship exchange, but also a space for valuable content. We’ve succeeded – and Impact’25 is the best proof,” says Krystian Wolak, initiator and creator of Impact.
🏙 Impact Town – city within a city
What was happening off stage was equally impressive. Impact Town – that’s what the 61,000+ sq. ft. space was called, which for two days functioned like a miniature, self-sustaining city of the future.
There was a main market (Impact Santander Stage), art galleries, a bookstore, stores, restaurants, cafes, foodtrucks, city bikes, a post office and even… a parcel machine.
More than 6,500 participants and 1,600 companies – from global giants to emerging startups – checked in at this temporary town. Meetings, workshops, demo days, networking and informal conversations over espresso – everything had its time and rhythm.
🧠 Impact is more than an event
Impact is a whole universe. An offline media platform that that publishes books, publishes magazines, organizes author meetings, exhibitions and social and cultural actions. During this year’s edition:
- more than 30 author meetings were held at Impact Bookstore,
- 15 closed lunches with speakers and speakers were organized,
- two exhibitions were shown in the Impact Art zone:
- the first – with works by Polish women artists from the Impact Art Collection,
- the second – prepared jointly with the Krupa Art Foundation, where more than 20 works were presented, including Salvador Dali, Wojciech Fangor, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, among others.
- The Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts showed a retrospective exhibition on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Waldemar Swierzy Poster Studio.
- Switzerland was Impact’s first-ever partner country. The Swiss pavilion was popular, as were the speeches from speakers and speakers from this country famous for innovation.
Among the participants of Impact were also Anda Rottenberg, Mariusz Trelinski, Anja Rubik, Michal Marszal, Magdalena Boczarska, Borys Szyc – not as special guests on the wall, but as real participants and commentators of the present day.
Impact is not slowing down. We already invite you to Romania for Impact Bucharest and look forward to the next edition of Impact CEE.
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👉 Check out Impact’25 recap in photos
